Book Summary and Reviews of The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

The Child in Time

by Ian McEwan

  • Published:
  • Nov 1999, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

With extraordinary tenderness and insight, the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child.

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone.

Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging paths as they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensify with the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts. The Child in Time is an astonishing novel by one of the finest writers of his generation.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Luminous, haunting, restrained ... cuts to the core of human existence." —Chicago Tribune

"Resonates with psychological reality: the beautifully layered relationships, the tracing of the many-layered love between father and child, husband and wife.... As artfully conceived as it is poignantly realized." —The New York Times Book Review

"A great pleasure to read.... McEwan writes as if Dickens, Lawrence, and Woolf were in his bones.... Funny and unsentimentally passionate." —The Wall Street Journal

This information about The Child in Time was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Ian McEwan Author Biography

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

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Link to Ian McEwan's Website

Other books by Ian McEwan at BookBrowse
  • The Children Act jacket
  • Sweet Tooth jacket

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Read-Alikes

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